The Three Kingdoms Kill in the Era of AI Computing Power Shortage: Who Can Grab More Power Supplies?

Nebius, Microsoft, and CoreWeave are engaged in a triangular competition in the AI infrastructure arena.

Key Highlights:

The core bottleneck is power supply and data center capacity, not technology. Nebius's capacity was sold out in seconds in Q3 this year, with CapEx increasing from $2 billion to $5 billion for infrastructure expansion by 2025, aiming to complete the connection of 800MW-1GW of power by the end of 2026. The goal is to achieve an ARR of $900 million to $1.1 billion in 2025, and to reach $7 billion to $9 billion in 2026.

Microsoft is getting fiercer: AI capacity is expected to increase by 80% by 2025, and the scale of data centers will double. Azure cloud services are expected to grow by 37% in Q2, but even with accelerated construction, capacity will be locked until the end of the fiscal year.

Although CoreWeave has sufficient financing and strong customer retention, it is being constrained by supply chain issues—delays in delivery from data center partners have forcibly cut the 2025 revenue forecast (from $5.15-5.35 billion down to $5.05-5.15 billion).

Current Situation: Demand >> Supply. Whoever can get power and hardware faster will win. Nebius's stock price has increased by 144% over six months, but the valuation hasn’t taken off yet (P/B is only 4.66x, industry average is 39.95x).

The outcome of this game does not lie in the code, but in the switch and the ground.